Saturday, October 21, 2006

STARKE -- A federal appeals court in Atlanta on Friday turned down the latest appeal of serial killer Danny Harold Rolling, who is scheduled to die Wednesday for the slayings of five college students in Gainesville in 1990.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Rolling's motion for a stay of execution and denied him permission to file new appeals in the U.S. District Court in Tallahassee.

Baya Harrison, the lawyer representing Rolling, filed documents using the same issues raised by Arthur Rutherford, who was executed Wednesday at Florida State Prison for the 1985 murder of a Milton woman.

Those included challenges to the chemicals used in the execution process, the America Bar Association's report on Florida's capital punishment system and claims that application of Florida's death penalty is inconsistent and freakishly imposed.

Rolling pleaded guilty in 1994 to the string of murders, and a judge followed a jury's unanimous recommendation that he be sentenced to death for each of the five killings.

Rolling terrorized Gainesville in late August and early September 1990, killing four women and a man in their off-campus apartments. One victim was decapitated and others were mutilated, posed and sexually assaulted.